18 primary schoolchildren buried in Chinese landslide

A huge landslide has engulfed a primary school in a remote part of south west China, burying 18 children.

The students at the Youfang Primary School, in Zhenhe village, Yunnan province, would not normally have been in school on Thursday as China is on a week-long national holiday.

But they were taking extra classes to catch up on lessons they missed when an earthquake struck the same region last month, killing 81 people and destroying several villages.

State television confirmed the deaths of five of the children, with the remainder still underground.

A rescue operation is under way with around 2,000 people at the site, including 400 soldiers from the local People's Liberation Army base.

"The rescue is going smoothly, and we have found five children so far," said Liu Chaowen, the head of the local fire brigade, to China National Radio. "The major obstacle to the rescue is that there are a number of large rocks and although we have three diggers working on the site, progress is quite slow."

The schoolhouse itself, a single-storey building, collapsed under the force of the landslide.

Two farmhouses near the school were also submerged and a local villager was buried. Images broadcast on state television showed rescue teams picking through the debris. Local government officials moved the rest of the villagers to safer ground after the disaster.

It said the landslide occurred after torrential rain in recent days, and showed a graphic explaining how the school was precariously placed at the foot of a steep mountain.

The landslide struck at 8am as students were arriving for classes, according to Chinese reports. "More than 30 students were supposed to attend classes today and there were 18 pupils at school before the class started this morning," a local official who gave only his surname, Yang, told AFP by phone.

"Are the officials all on vacation? Why was there no alert? Why were there students in school during the holidays?" a user of Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, posted after the disaster.